GoDaddy Offers Apology to Customers for "Internal Network Events"

GoDaddy is the most popular domain name registrar on the web, thanks in large part to its annoyingly incessant teaser commercials featuring pseudo risque clothing options worn well known TV and sports personalities and the promise of more if you visit the website. These ads are particularly prominent during big events like the Super Bowl.

They also have the most frustratingly stupid user interface I've ever seen. But, in recent months, GoDaddy has been known as the company that decided to back proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation that is generally feared and hated across the web.

As a result, the unofficial leader of hacker collective Anonymous decided to take them down and down they went last week, taking with them thousands of websites whose domain names or sites were hosted by GoDaddy. Over the weekend, they sent an apology to customers via e-mail.

We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services.

We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities -- and the trust you place in us -- very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.

The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem.

At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.

It's an honor to serve you. As always, please call us 24/7 at 480-505-8877 -- anytime, for any reason.

Sincerely,

Scott Wagner CEO GoDaddy.com

The most notable portion of the missive comes in the description of the problem as a "series of internal network events that corrupted router tables." I get that GoDaddy didn't want to outright mention the fact that, allegedly, a lone hacker blacked out their entire network. No sense in encouraging others to do the same. But, while they may have "implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem," they have yet to address the most glaring issue: their support of restrictive legislation aimed at limiting access to the Internet to people who can't pay for it.

If it wasn't enough that thousands of GoDaddy customers took their business elsewhere when the news of their support for SOPA came to light, I would like to hope this "warning shot" as it has been described by some might make them rethink their position. Of course, they are also known for taking down entire user accounts surreptitiously when a copyright violation is reported for even one of the user's websites, so my guess is this won't teach them anything.

Honestly, I don't know why people use GoDaddy. It's not the cheapest registrar. It's certainly has one of the worst user interfaces ever invented. And they hate freedom -- well, at least they back legislation that could inhibit Internet freedom, but the shorter sentence sounded better.

Jeff Balke is a writer, editor, photographer, tech expert and native Houstonian. He has written for a wide range of publications and co-authored the official 50th anniversary book for the Houston Rockets.